


10:04pm

by HeyMcRaely



Category: Back to the Future (Movies)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:14:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25851934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeyMcRaely/pseuds/HeyMcRaely
Summary: A town portrait in two hundredths of a second.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 8





	10:04pm

They’ve been toeing the path to her porch for what feels like minutes. The wind, which had been picking up the whole walk home, gives a particularly insistent push and his suit jacket flies from her shoulders. It tears a white shape in the night sky as it flaps, birdlike, down the sidewalk. The boy fumbles for it and the girl darts forward to give chase. But it flits out of their reach, over the street. The boy zips, long-legged off the curb; his dress shoes slide. The girl shouts; her dress whips into a froth. Another gust and they lose balance with each other, meet on the asphalt in the middle of her street.

He looks shaken. He looks scared. He looks like this was all a spell that’s been broken. He looks at her. And she smiles. So he smiles. And they’re kind of giggling and okay maybe there was something in that punch at the dance.

“It’s up in the tree,” he says, pointing to the oak across from her house, where the white jacket has snagged on an overhanging branch.

“Are you alright?” she asks him. He hit the ground pretty hard. He nods.

“Are you?”

She nods. For the second time that night, he pulls her to her feet. 

They’re one millimeter apart when the light flashes, fluorescent behind their eyelids.

⇦ ⇦

The boy is breathing hard. The boy has a feeling like a hand gripping his guts on the right side, and his mouth is thick with spit. His feet feel like television static every time they hit the ground. He is cold and wet from rain that he’s outrun. He is hot and clammy from going so long. Hot and cold, like he felt the time he was eight and had the worst fever he’s ever had, when he couldn’t get out of bed for a week. When he couldn’t keep anything down. He almost had to stop on the way here and reacquaint himself with that part of the memory. Dirt road has turned to suburban sidewalk, to town street. Now he would hear a distant roar if not for the harshness of his breath and the rumbling overhead. He’s still far up the street when the world goes white.

⇦ ⇦ 

The same boy, only younger, is suspended in a moment of high terror. Every muscle tight. Familiar buildings whip past faster and more nightmarish than he’s ever seen them from a bumper. His hands ache on the steering wheel as the car starts to shudder. Town streets weren’t built wide enough for this. Over screeching nerves, he glances out toward the patch of green, flashing by far too quickly. Imagines he sees a pale stripe of a person. He thinks “for the last time” but is interrupted--a sudden veering of the vehicle. He pulls hard on the wheel, steeling himself. He’s only done this once before. It’s not old yet. Neither is he. He leans back, grits teeth, and there is not one but several flashes, so he doesn’t quite know where the divide begins or ends.

…Until his ears pop and his chest expands and he’s forgotten that on the other side of the lightning, he still needs to _stop._

Which he manages barely, with the help of a movie theater.


End file.
